Defense Budgets and Immortality

Dear Mr. President,

Normally I rant about the lousy job you’re doing, how you betrayed us, how you lie and deal behind closed doors with dictators, Republicans and corporate oligarchs, but today’s letter contains some helpful advice: how to get cranks like me off your back. I read Michael Ventura’s latest Letters at 3AM column in the Austin Chronicle called “Why not Chicken Fat?” He adds up how much is spent on national defense and, although nobody knows for sure, he comes up with roughly a trillion dollars a year. A trillion is a lot of bucks, Mr. President, and it’s not making us securer or safer. Yesterday, another suicide bomber penetrated the most secure area of Kabul and blew himself up near NATO headquarters, the American Embassy, Karzai’s palace and a CIA installation. All the money you’re pissing away on defense and security can’t even keep an 82-year-old activist nun out of the nuclear arms factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for crying out loud, so why not just paste a smiley face on it, put some lipstick on that national security pig, cut the defense/security budgets by 50%—back to the level of 2000—and say, Every Man For Himself. Makes sense to me; we’re no better off now than we were in 2000. Get rid of the thousands of off-the-books mercenaries running around Iraq and Afghanistan and whoknowswhere, kill that humungous data center you’re building in Utah to store all our phone calls, emails, credit card, banking and Facebook information, eliminate the 17 intelligence agencies, the TSA who confiscate the remains of our toothpaste tubes before they let us on an airplane but hasn’t foiled a hijacking plot in years … You see what I mean? There’s tons of savings here. And I guarantee we’d be a lot safer if you’d just stop with the drones and Hellfire missiles and assassinations and undeclared wars that create terrorists faster than we can kill them. Eleven years of war hasn’t worked, Mr. President. Why not give peace a chance? Why not get at root causes of enmity and hatred and change some lousy policies? I know it’s not easy but that’s what you got hired to do, the hard work of peace. War’s easy. Order others to die, pour money into war profiteers’ coffers, and it’s an easy ride. But peace takes real heroes, people who’ll stand up to the oligarchs, capitalists, war mongers and haters of freedom and justice. It’s hard, unthankful work and you don’t get to play Zeus hurling thunderbolts on mere mortals but if you want to be immortal it’s the only way.